Tell me what news reports you believe, and I'll tell you what you didn't study in school. Over at Insight Scoop, Carl Olson is working the Da Vinci code biscuit, as we who grew up in the original Chocolate City used to say (what really frosts me about Ray Nagin is his stealing props from D.C.). I'm personally over the Da Vinci Code, and even more over outrage against the Da Vinci Code, but I was interested in this anecdote:
Two friends of mine — a husband and wife — recently obtained, respectively, a PhD in history and an MA in art/architecture from a major university. The husband told me that many students and teachers in the history department were enamored by TDVC and its claims about art and architecture, but laughed off most of the claims made about historical events and figures. Meanwhile, his wife said that students and teachers in the art/architecture departmens laughed off the novel's silly claims about Leonardo da Vinci and his paintings, but were seriously taken by the historical assertions about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, early Christianity, and the Catholic Church.
Shouldn't finding a text to be preposterous in one respect make a person skeptical about its other claims? Yet I find this phenomenon of credulity --especially where conspiracy or malfeasance is alleged-- to be rather the rule than the exception. I can think of a prominent writer who spends a good deal of ink exposing how ridiculous the press is in regard to his own field --yet gets himself in high dudgeon every time any of the "new movements" shows up in the papers; he's quick to believe the worst. Even when, as happened recently, the reporter claims that a priestly congregation has "lay nuns" as members. That's three mistakes in one sentence, and mistakes of the nature that ought to give one pause about the reporter's knowledgability, no?
I once heard a brilliant psychiatrist argue that cynicism at a certain point becomes a pathology. What begins as simple realism or caution --out of awareness of fallen human nature-- at a certain point actually blinds us to reality, because we can no longer believe in anything --and some things are true! His example was that if a person is unfailingly kind day in and day out and one day slips and insults someone, the typical reaction is, "Now we see the real him." But that's not the real him; the real him is the usual and habitual nice guy. This is why I said that thinking well of others --an aspect of charity-- is not willful naiveté, but necessary in the defense of Truth.
